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Friday, October 26, 2012

welcome to finish it up Friday! today all i can say is, "oh, my achin' back."

i've finally finished painting a few rooms in my house and put them all back together. i hate living in a state of limbo, but i've been there for 3 weeks. that much painting back to back is NOT a good idea. BUT...let's see the progress!

my daughter's room is finished. the walls were previously painted, but all the trim, windows, baseboards, ledge, door and closet doors got at least 3 coats of shiny white paint. isn't it a cute little girl's room? (i had to quick snap some photos while it was still clean!) i think she needs a few more pillows. and a few more quilts, too. they don't quite meet in the middle. :)

all that white trim it almost makes the hunter green carpet bearable. :)

i also finished all the trim, windows, doors and stuff in the master bedroom.

oh how I love the white trim. again, it makes the blue carpet not quite so bad.

everything in the master bathroom got a fresh coat of paint, too, including the trim. the bathroom is broken up into 2 different rooms, so the main part got a new coat of blue and then the other space got a fresh coat of off white paint. i don't recall that i've actually painted any walls white since i was at home living with my dad 19 years ago. i do love some color on my walls! but i had white leftover paint in the basement and i wanted to use what i had. so white it was.

still more painting to do, but i'm so glad that some rooms are finished! it's amazing what paint can do! if you have all kinds of time. :)

now it's your turn! link up your finishes of the week. thanks so much for joining me!

Thursday, October 25, 2012

I've gotten some great mail recently. A few days ago the newest issue of quilty came in the mail. That's my math facts quilt on the front cover! Didn't they make it look good? I'm tickled that it was included in the magazine and then the fact that it made the cover? Woo-hoo! I'm pleased that my name made the front cover, too. Sweet!

Speaking of sweet....a friend sent me some cookies last week. It was a "thinking-of-you-hope-everything-is-going-ok" kind of a thing. Almost made me cry. It really makes me want to be a thoughtful friend like that, you know? They sure hit the spot after a long day of painting. Thanks so much, darlin'.

And last but not least! My Gruber's retreat friends and I did a swap this fall. Rene made me this fabulous mini quilt. She put so much thought into it and I just love it! She even quilted "use your scraps" (that's the phrase I use to sign my books) into the background. I love that touch-so thoughtful! She sent me a super awesome seam ripper and some thread, too. Thanks so much, Rene, for an awesome swap package!

I'm so thankful for my friends this week. I am blessed with some pretty amazing ones.

Friday, October 19, 2012

Last night at about 11:30 I finished up my super scrap happy quilt top. It wasn't in the plans to finish it up so quickly, but once I started working on it I couldn't stop. My sister thinks I might need an intervention. :)

Be that as it may......I LOVE IT!!!!!!!!!!!

It measures about 64" x 74".

(I can't stop staring at it!)

If you have a finish to share this week please link up! (Remember to link to a specific blog post.) Thanks for joining me and happy Friday!

Thursday, October 18, 2012

thanks for all the sweet comments in my last post. i should have mentioned that we are moving back to central MN. we have no idea where we will land specifically yet...still need to figure out that piece. my kids want to go house hunting in the worst way, but i am insistent that we start looking after ours is listed for sale.

i've been painting trim and doors for 7 days and boy am I cranky! there is still so much to do. i feel like i'm in painting purgatory.

last night after my kids went to bed and my husband was at work, i treated myself to some quilting time. (there has been so little quilting time lately, which is making me even more cranky.) this is my super scrap happy quilt. the top is still in several sections that i need to fit together, but i am really loving it! LOTS of time invested in this baby. it's a medium lap size now, so i might keep going and make it a bit bigger. (it's all constructed in slabs, as described in sunday morning quilts.)

i've all but emptied the bowl and bin of scraps that i designated for this project. hurray for progress!

just to clarify, i'm not running out of scraps. not even close! :)

on saturday i will be one of the featured artists on the river falls art crawl. i'll be doing a trunk show at riverside quilting in river falls. i'll also be doing a book signing and selling copies of the book...and perhaps some other goods, too. if you are in the area i'd love it if you would stop in and say hello! the hours are 10am-4pm.

last saturday i went to a quilt show in hastings, mn. 300 quilts were displayed in the sanctuary of St. Luke's. it was absolutely beautiful. both vintage and new quilts were draped over the back of all the pews. it was spectacular.

hands down my favorite quilt at the show was made by Ann Mayhew. it was made of pinwheels and shoo fly blocks that finished at 1.5"! it was absolutely stunning.

it was made from all solids, which i loved. it had a total of 23,808 pieces. wowza. it only took her 3 years! i must meet this woman someday.

Monday, October 15, 2012

No, I'm not talking about quilt market. I don't have 12 super secret projects that I can't show you. I'm talking about getting our house ready to put on the market. My husband accepted a new job last Thursday and he started today. We are headed into transition (again) and we are going to have to move. I'm sure it will be alright in the end, but getting there will be a little painful. I'm not a big fan of change. (that's an understatement.)

This means that my sewing time has been replaced by....

painting trim. Fun. Times. I know that you are supposed to change your sewing machine needle after 8 hours of sewing. I wonder how many hours you can paint with a brush before you need to change it? I bet I'm due for a new one!

It's going to be a hard transition, but at least I have a pretty box of tissues. :)

Friday, October 12, 2012

Today I'm happy to share my finished big big bento quilt! It uses the technicolor tidings collection (and lots of white), all from Connecting Threads. I love their stuff! I think I said this before, but I love that there is ORANGE in a Christmas line. It's perfect!

I did my concentric ameoba quilting on it. (LOVE!) White would have been an obvious thread choice, so I went with an ocean mist color. Since I used a very thin thread (70 weight) the color doesn't stand out too much on either the white or the bright colored fabric. I love that!

I bound it with some of the original Flea Market Fancy dots. I'll be so sad when I run out of them. They make perfect binding...and it's such a pleasant color green.

For the back I used 4 one yard cuts of dots (also from Connecting Threads, but these have been in my stash for almost a year) with some patchwork squares left over from the front. It was a concept that popped in my head and I had no idea if it would work or not, but the final results exceeded my expectations. Yay! I do love a pieced quilt back. Just another opportunity to play.

Aren't those dots just perfect with the patchwork?

The quilt currently lives at the end of my bed. I've been using it for my 4th layer at night. (And it's only October! It's a darn good thing I'm a quilter!) It measures 72" square. I'm not normally a fan of square quilts, but they are growing on me. I blame/credit Cheryl. :)

How about you? If you have a finish to share, please remember to link to a specific post. Then go ahead and visit a few other finishers and cheer them on. Thanks for joining me! Happy Friday!

Friday, October 05, 2012

Welcome to finish it up Friday! If it weren't for this linky party there is no way I'd be done with this project this soon. Just another reason to love this community of bloggers that I'm a part of. :)

SO...I finished my boy's huge pillow cover. It's 36" square. The cover fits per-fect-ly! I talked about the quilting in this post. It is finished with a zipper closure. Is it scary that I just happened to have a super long one in my zipper stash to finish it off? I think it might be a little telling of the amount of supplies that I squirrel away. Oy. But...it did save me a bunch of running around to try to find one. So there IS that...

This was my first time adding zipper tabs into a project and it went swimmingly. I tried to look at a few tutorials on-line, but they weren't loading fast enough (impatient much?) so I used a little common sense and kinda made it up. It worked, so I'm happy!

My son really likes his pillow. We all do, actually. It's ginormous, ridiculous and fun! The grey and orange are so his colors. (It's unusual that his outfit doesn't match his pillow. I'm telling you.) So there it is. A happy finish.

(My goodness, does he look like a pre-teen or what??? When did that happen?)

How about you? Do you have a finish to share? If so, please link up here. Please remember to link to a specific post.﻿ Thanks for playing along as we finish up our UFOs and WIPs!

Thursday, October 04, 2012

I'm hurriedly working on a finish to share tomorrow. It's surprising how fast the weeks go. Yikes! (But on the other hand, I do love a deadline...it's a motivator like no other.)

I quilted up my son's gigantic pillow panels using this tutorial by Oh Fransson. It was a lot of fun! It was great to be able to use the patchwork as a built in guide-that made the quilting so easy. Plus it reminds me of my apple cake quilt...one of my all time favorites. Now to tackle the zipper and wrestle the pillow into it's cover. Oh, yay! :)

Hopefully your finishes are coming along nicely. See you tomorrow for finish it up Friday!

Wednesday, October 03, 2012

A few weeks (months?) ago I was looking closely at this rug, which resides in my kids' bathroom. I love the scrappiness of it, but it never was quite right. (Kinda like me, ha!) Anyway, the rug was shaped like a trapezoid rather than a rectangle. It always kind of bugged me and folding it in half only disguised the oddball shape a little bit. I decided to a take a stab at making it right. The worst that could happen would be that I had a big ball of fabric 'yarn' to knit again. Right? So I pulled out the cast off edge, picked up the stitches to the best of my ability and started knitting again.

I'm happy to say that it worked! I finished the rug (again) this afternoon. It's about double the size that it was....now measuring about 33" x 41". It feels soooooooo good to step on it. Truth be told, the new and improved shape doesn't make the texture any better, but my obsessive nature sure feels better about it!

So, my question to you is, have you ever done anything like this? Please tell me that I'm not the only (crazy)one who has to go back and fix things after they are finished...even if it is years later.

A bit more detail on the rug....

This rug is knit with a single strand of fabric 'yarn' on size 17 needles. More details in this post.

I've also made a bulkier version using size 35 needles and the tutorial for that is here.

I'd also like to mention (because I get asked this all the time) that they are machine washable and go through the dryer just fine and dandy. They wear very well, too!